equal) on the extent of this
sympathy. If he rests content with narrow enjoyment of outward forms,
and light sensations of luxurious tragedy, and so goes on multiplying
his sketches of mere picturesque material, he necessarily settles down
into the ordinary "clever" artist, very good and respectable,
maintaining himself by his sketching and painting in an honorable way,
as by any other daily business, and in due time passing away from the
world without having, on the whole, done much for it. Such has been the
necessary, not very lamentable, destiny of a large number of men in
these days, whose gifts urged them to the practice of art, but who
possessing no breadth of mind, nor having met with masters capable of
concentrating what gifts they had towards nobler use, almost perforce
remained in their small picturesque circle; getting more and more
narrowed in range of sympathy as they fell more and more into the habit
of contemplating the one particular class of subjects that pleased them,
and recomposing them by rules of art.

I need not give instances of this class, we have very few painters who
belong to any other; I only pause for a moment to _except_ from it a man
too often confounded with the draughtsmen of the lower picturesque;--a
very great man, who, though partly by chance, and partly by choice,
limited in range of subject, possessed for that subject the profoundest
and noblest sympathy--Samuel Prout. His renderings of the character of
old buildings, such as that spire of Calais, are as perfect and as
heartfelt as I can conceive possible; nor do I suppose that any one else
will ever hereafter equal them.[7] His early works show that he
possessed a grasp of mind which could have entered into almost any kind
of landscape subject; that it was only chance--I do not know if
altogether evil chance--which fettered him to stones; and that in
reality he is to be numbered among the true masters of the nobler
picturesque.

Sec. 16. Of these, also, the ranks rise in worthiness, according to their
sympathy. In the noblest of them, that sympathy seems quite unlimited;
they enter with their whole heart into all nature; their love of grace
and beauty keeps them from delighting too much in shattered stones and
stunted trees, their kindness and compassion from dwelling by choice on
any kind of misery, their perfect humility from avoiding simplicity of
subject when it comes in their way, and their grasp of the highest
thoughts fr